IT IS a remarkable story of two prime ministers and two friends. Both were elected in 1997 having rescued their respective parties from political oblivion.

Both oversaw economic prosperity during their decade at the top and both were hugely responsible for finally delivering peace in Northern Ireland.

Last week, one of them signalled his intention to stand down and, by Friday week, it is very possible that the other will also be making the same speech.

The careers of Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern have been intertwined to such an extraordinary degree over the last decade that it is tempting to believe that fate has dictated that Ahern must now follow the UK prime minister out of office.

But while Blair eventually responded to the urging of his party to go, don't for a second doubt that it will take a crowbar to prise Bertie Ahern out of the Department of the Taoiseach.

For all his faults, there was so much to admire about Blair, a phenomenal politician, whose achievements have been largely overlooked in recent years. He made Labour not just electable but the natural party of government which, for those of us able to remember the party's disastrous election campaigns of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, was genuinely remarkable.

It's astonishing that many people on the left in Ireland still retain such affection for the likes of Michael Foot and Tony Benn . . . both advocates of the type of British Labour Party that was unelectable . . . yet there is often little regard for the one man who actually achieved the ending of two decades of Conservative rule. The die-hards will claim that Blair extinguished socialism as a political force in Britain, completely missing the reality that the British people had done that years earlier.

Blair's big problem was that he could never have delivered on the frankly naive wave of optimism that greeted his arrival in 10 Downing Street in May 1997. The whole notion that Britain would overnight change into some form of utopia under a Labour government was only tenable if one subscribed to the cartoon caricature of Thatcher and the Tories as the personification of evil. Politics and the world was, and remains, slightly more complex than that, as anybody who remembers Labour's disastrous management of Britain during the infamous Winter of Discontent. There is simply no getting away from the harsh reality that, even under a Labour government, the coalfields and the shipyards would have closed down and British Airways would have been privatised.

However, while utopia has not been achieved, there is a strong case to be made that Britain is a better place than it was before Blair became prime minister.

Obviously, the disaster of the British involvement in Iraq has seriously damaged his legacy, but it would be genuinely sad if his other achievements were ignored. Blair's most attractive quality was that he made decisions. He was a genuine conviction politician. His stance was best summed up in that famous address to the Labour Party conference that had a day earlier cheered as Gordon Brown reaffirmed so-called "traditional Labour values" (such as routinely losing elections, presumably): "I can only go one way. I've not got a reverse gear. The time to trust a politician most is not when they're taking the easy optionf Leadership comes by instinct. I believe the British people will forgive a government mistake, will put the media onslaught in more perspective than we think, but what they won't forgive is cowardice in the face of a challenge, " he said.

It's true that this conviction led him to the Iraqi debacle, but it also led to his and Nato's involvement in Kosovo in 1999 . . .

incredibly opposed by some on the left at the time . . . and the successful conclusion of the Northern Ireland peace process.

He made mistakes but, arguably, only because he was courageously willing to take risks to follow his beliefs . . . a trait largely absent in Irish politics today.

Nobody could ever accuse Bertie Ahern (or Enda Kenny for that matter) of taking risks to follow their beliefs.

Other than being utterly wedded to the notion of social partnership, it's hard to know exactly what the Taoiseach's beliefs are. A conviction politician he ain't. A cynic might suggest that, like Blair, Ahern has only one setting on his gear box, the only problem is that it's neutral.

Rather than deciding 'what is the right way and trying to walk it' as Blair once described his approach to leadership, Ahern is more likely to assess what's the most politically advantageous route before walking anywhere. But the other side of the coin is that this approach has made him the formidable politician he is today.

For all Blair's courage, vision and understanding of what the Labour Party needed to do to win and keep power, he is only in the halfpenny place compared to Ahern when it comes to political strategy. There is a growing view among commentators that Enda Kenny is now a warm favourite to win the election but it would be absolute folly to discount Ahern.

You will never see him delivering a speech to an ardfheis peppered with the words 'I believe in', but the sad reality about political life is that maybe, just maybe that's why, unlike Blair, he will still be around at his party's next annual conference to deliver the key note speech.